The Premier had 10 personal meetings with lobbyists all up. Six of those were with Adani’s lobbyists.

The effort was especially intense earlier this year as Adani brokered concessions on mining royalty payments from the State Government.

On five consecutive days at the end of May, as the deal was being hammered out, Adani’s lobbyists held meetings with Ms Palaszczuk’s chief of staff, David Barbagallo — a notorious ALP hard man.

The fruits of the lobbying effort are there for all to see.

A deferment of mining royalties under a secret deal with the Queensland Government — worth big money to Adani — despite Labor’s pledge at the 2015 election not to subsidise the Adani mine.

A declaration that the Adani project was “critical infrastructure” — a status never previously granted to a mining project — which exempts it from a raft of planning controls and potential legal objections.

Compulsory acquisition of land along a 388km corridor for the mine’s railway by the state’s coordinator-general, even before finance for the project is in place.

And, at least until recently, the vocal support of the Labor state Premier and continued backing of the state Opposition.

The fact that Adani had pretty much all the concessions it sought was one reason for the lobbying firm to bow out.

But a more compelling reason, perhaps, was the stench surrounding Mr Milner continuing to act for Adani while also playing a key role, albeit unpaid, in Labor’s Queensland re-election campaign.

The Premier had previously said she saw no problem with this, nor with Mr Milner appearing as a star turn at $5,500-a-head event with the Queensland Labor cabinet.

Adani also used Next Level to lobby members of Federal Parliament on Adani’s behalf, but how much contact Mr Milner and his staff had we do not know. The Commonwealth, unlike Queensland, does not require that lobbying contacts be logged on a register.

What is clear is that Mr Milner is familiar with the revolving door between politics and lobbying.

He spent 18 months as Bill Shorten’s chief of staff — helping hone the strategy that nearly carried Labor to victory at the 2016 election — moving directly from his role as Adani’s lobbyist to the Opposition Leader’s office, then back again.

The business of influence-peddling

He is but one of many who have leveraged their political experience into a career in the business of influence-peddling.

Think Martin Ferguson, a former long-standing resources minister who now chairs the advisory board of APPEA (Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association), which bills itself as “the voice of Australia’s oil and gas industry”.

On the face of it, it seems to be a clear-cut conflict of interest for a current Member of Parliament, elected to serve the people, to be taking a salary from an industry lobby group.

Yet Australia’s highest law officer, Attorney-General George Brandis, recently told a Senate hearing that such “third party” payments to backbench MPs were both commonplace and acceptable.

The revolving door between politics and lobbying is a potential source of corruption in the mining approvals process, according to a recent report by Transparency International.

Not the kind of crookedness that Adani Enterprise is accused of in India, where, according to evidence obtained on warrant by the anti-corruption authority in the southern state of Karnataka, it engaged in systemic corruption, paying regular bribes to a large number of police and public officials to smooth the way for illegal exports of iron ore.

More the bread-and-butter process corruption that sees decisions made that did not deserve to be made on the merits.

What the lobbying could not do, however, was make Adani’s planned mega mine popular.

Large sample surveys by reputable pollsters suggest a majority of Australians oppose the project, and a vast majority believe it should not receive government subsidies, such as a proposed $1 billion loan from the Federal Government’s Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility.

But in a world where big money and influence-peddling hold sway, that may not be enough to stop Adani.

This article first appeared on the ABC Website on 23 November 2017 . Stephen Long is a senior ABC journalist

2 Responses to STEPHEN LONG. The Adani lobbyist and Labor insider who smoothed the way for the mega mine

yes, all this is toxic. A culture seems to have taken hold in our major political parties that making money out of one’s political position is the point of politics. The immoral has become normal. The institutional counter-reaction must have a moral dimension to it.

As a Labor member and voter oflongstanding this absolutely disgusts me. The Qld Labor govt pandering to Adani and its peddling of their lies about the number of jobs and environmental protections involved disgusts me.
Pity our poor grandchildren and the climate changed world our self interested pollies are prepared to condemn them to.

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